ABOVE: FLICKR, MICHAEL VADON
T
he White House released its 2020 budget proposal yesterday (March 11) and, for the third year in a row, President Donald Trump has recommended significant slashes to the budgets of science agencies including the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.
In total, the proposed budget would cut R&D spending by 11 percent, ScienceInsider reports. In a statement from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), Trump’s science adviser Kelvin Droegemeier calls the draft budget “an important down payment on America’s future,” according to ScienceInsider. But not everyone agrees with that sentiment.
“[Such cuts] would derail our nation’s science enterprise,” Rush Holt, CEO of AAAS (which publishes Science), tells ScienceInsider. Benjamin Krinsky, associate director for legislative affairs at the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology in Rockville, Maryland, agrees. “I think it would be a disaster for science if ...
